6 Chapter One Rickets Putrid Meat AND PLUMPY’NUT It wasn’t until the 1920s scientists discovered vitamin D even in the form of artificial sunlight was necessary to prevent rickets In approximately 500 BCE Greek scholar Herodotus was inspecting the skeletons of soldiers killed in battle a century earlier in the Egyptian town of Pelusium He noticed the skulls of the Persian soldiers were so thin a small pebble could crush them The skulls of the Egyptian soldiers however were so strong only a large rock caused damage When Herodotus inquired about the unusual observation townspeople provided little information The only difference they could remember was the Persians wore turbans while the Egyptians fought bareheaded exposing their heads to the sun What caused the Persian skulls to crack so easily while all the Egyptian skulls were strong More than 2,000 years later in 1650 CE Professor Francis Glisson studied at Cambridge University in England He was investigating a disease affecting many
8 young children and old women The disease caused weak bones and deformities including bowed legs curved spines square skulls and poor teeth It also caused people to suffer from swollen joints and abdomens Professor Glisson published his account of the disease However he was not able to identify the cause of the bone deformities and other symptoms For the next 200 years incidents of the disease came and went often aligning with the quality of the food crop Then the Industrial Revolution transformed English society People poured into the cities from the countryside to work They lived in crowded neighborhoods called slums where the soot from factories blocked the sun’s rays A poor diet of primarily white bread and tea was the only food people were able to afford The disease outlined by Glisson now called rickets was common in poor urban children In 1890 it was discovered the disease was more common in places where there was less sunlight Soon doctors were prescribing time in the sun to prevent rickets The underlying cause of rickets however would not be discovered until the 1920s when scientists found a link between vitamin D RICKETS ACROSS THE WORLD Rickets did not only affect children in the impoverished neighborhoods of England’s cities In 1921 rickets affected 75 percent of all infants in New York City 1 The disease continues to be a problem Today children in Africa and parts of tropical Asia suffer from rickets mainly from a lack of calcium in their diets Rickets is also becoming common again in wealthier nations including the United States and European countries Doctors believe this may be due to children spending more time indoors and not producing enough vitamin D through sunlight or from wearing more sunscreen which prevents the sun’s UV rays from penetrating the skin
9 which human bodies produce after receiving sunlight and bone growth The bone deformities and weakness caused by rickets were the results of a lack of vitamin D calcium or phosphate in a child’s diet Exposure to sunlight and eating dairy and Doctors considered rickets which causes bowed legs to be the most common childhood disease in the 1920s
